My Shrieking Skin

By Jon Jacks

The way some older guys check you out – well, doesn’t it just creep you out?
It does me.
Makes my skin crawl.
Dogs. Snakes. Wolves.
That’s all these guys are, you ask me.
Sure, there has to be at least one good guy out there.
But finding him – well, that ain’t so easy, is it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Jan 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463537633

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Have you ever felt that? – the way your skin sort of shrinks back a little, freezes even, as someone loathsome touches you?

And the older you get, girls, the more of these loathsome touches you’ve got to suffer.

Or is it just that we’ve always suffered them; we’re just suddenly far more aware of them?

Yeah; I reckon that’s it, don’t you?

*

Up the hallway, for instance, apartment 10, there’s ‘dear old Mr Anguine’, as Mom stupidly insists on calling him.

She sends me there, running ‘errands’ for him.

Sure, he’s always finding things for me to do; excuses to call me over.

Is Mom blind?

If there aren’t any errands, I’ve got to check that ‘he’s all right’.

Me being all right, well, that comes way down the list, obviously.

No, he’s not ‘all right’, Mom!

He’s all wrong.

In every way you can think of.

In every way you don’t want to think of.

I hate going in there, stepping into his dingy, rank-smelling apartment.

I hate being out in the corridor, if he’s passing by.

Or even if he’s just peering out of his slightly ajar door.

I hate him.

He’s a snake.

A real live snake of a man.

*

Chapter 3

Mr Anguine, he’s not the only odd one, naturally.

Mr Rongeur, he’s a rat. Mr Skilos a dog. Dr Lopez, an old, gnarled wolf. Mr Affe, he’s probably the easiest to deal with; a mischievous monkey who giggles like a naughty boy when you slap his hand away – as opposed to threatening to tell Mom, the police, that you’re guilty of assault.

There are others, too. Too numerous to mention, as they say.

You might have been unfortunate enough to have met them yourself, out on the streets; in the shops; on a bus.

If you haven’t met them, you’ve met men like them, right?

And does your Mom believe you, when you tell her they’re looking at you funny?

Bet she doesn’t want to cause a fuss; tells you to ignore it, at best.

Or you’ve just got an overactive imagination; yeah, she’ll tell you that if she’s like my Mom.

‘Oh, don’t be so silly, Lorie!’ she sighs, like I’ve placed her in the most exasperating positon it’s possible to be in.

Like I’m imagining things.

Imagining the way these guys are imagining that I don’t have any clothes on.

She tells me we have to be polite to our elders; that we have to show them respect at all times

It’s rude to refuse their requests, to ignore them when they simply want someone to talk to. They’re just lonely, after all.

They don’t mean any harm; they’re just trying to be friendly, in their own, special way.

Closest I get to her admitting I might be telling the truth is when she says she had to put up with it all when she was young; so why shouldn’t I?

*

I take it you’ve heard that expression, ‘she’s just a ghost of her former self’?

In Mom’s case, it’s true.

If she was ever beautiful, well, that beauty’s long gone.

So, where do I get my looks from?

Grandma; she’s the one who’s clung on to her looks. If they ever bothered going out, ever bothered getting together, then anyone seeing them would get their relationship totally the wrong way round.

But no one I know of has ever seen them together.

Maybe Mom avoids her because she knows it would be so humiliating for her.

I mean, it’s not like either of them have far to travel.

Gran lives in the same apartment block.

Sure, it’s on the bottom floor, way back in a corner; but Mom sees nothing wrong with sending me traipsing down there on a regular basis, making sure ‘gran’s all right’, and ‘running errands’ for her.

Not that I mind all that much, of course.

I’ve got a strong sense of connection with Gran; far more than I have with Mom.

The connection between me and Mom, well, I’ve got to admit; it just doesn’t exist anymore. If it ever did.

Mom, she seems kinda empty; know what I’m saying?

Like there’s a part of her living in a different world – a better world, where everything’s still going okay for her.

She prefers that world to this one, and who can blame her?

In this world, she just lets her empty shell sort of shuffle around, going through the motions of keeping alive. Just so she can keep that imaginary world going, of course, for once the shell does, so does the imaginary world.

Me, I can fend for myself now, she says.

Sorry, she also says.

She should be a better Mom.

She just can’t be anymore.

*

Chapter 3

If I remember it all correctly, life was all so much better when I was younger,

Then again, do I remember it all correctly?

I mean, whenever I try and think about it, try and cast my mind back to how it all used to be, I can’t remember everything, can I?

And so maybe, just maybe, there’s a part of my mind blocking out the stuff I’d prefer not to remember.

That’s how memories work, unfortunately, right?

Or, maybe, the word I should be using is fortunately.

*

How can we possibly know what we’ve been made to forget?

There could be all sorts of events in our past that might as well have never happened as far as our brain’s concerned; and yet they did happen. And that’s precisely why our brain doesn’t want to store them, thank you very much.

Don’t get me wrong here.

I mean, I’m not saying anything truly sordid happened to me back then.

Far from it; as far as I’m aware, least ways.

Everything seemed so much nicer then.

I mean, isn’t it supposed to be the other way round? Aren’t you supposed to be frightened of the most ridiculous things when you’re young?

Back then though, way I recall it, the apartment block was a really nice place to live; people in every apartment patting me on the head, giving me sweets, giving me a reassuring touch of the knee when I politely sat down at their table to enjoy a cake, or a cookie.

Mom was a mom then too.

Dad was a dad, in the sense of dads who are never, ever around.

He left before I was born.

I suspect that’s why, eventually, Mom ‘left’ me too.

She just couldn’t cope, raising a kid on her own while also working to pay the bills.

She really cared for me back then, I’m sure of it.

Not that she doesn’t care for me now, in the more limited meaning of the word; I mean, she loves me and all that, but physically the care just ain’t there anymore.

Sometimes I look at her and I wonder; is this my future too?

It can be inherited, can’t it? Depression, I mean.

Madness.

Gran assures me there’s no need for